Mind control: Buyer psychology

Buyer psychology

Persuasion is a powerful thing, made all the more powerful if you understand the science behind it. Maxine-Laurie Marshall reveals how marketers could be using psychology to influence their customers

Do you tell your customers to ‘click here’ and they ignore you? Are your instructions clear but people just aren’t following them? Tough break. But fear not. Through an understanding of behavioural psychology you could be tapping into your customer’s emotions and persuading them to interact with you.

Persuasive techniques, if used properly, can be perfectly powerful. They can result in more sales, better brand perception and even more sales. But I recommend going beyond the use of alliteration, the rule of three and repetition, as advised by my junior school English teacher, and delving into the world of psychology.

Julian French, senior strategic planner at Bray Leino, says: “All communications, whether B2B or B2C, are about persuading customers to act.” French uses psychological principles in his work. Citing Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, French says: “Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great and turned him into a great persuasive speaker using his three principles of persuasion. Pathos: emotion, Logis: rational/logic and Ethos: credibility, something the message giver has to have.”

If you’re going to be successful at persuading prospects to become customers you’re going to need to master all three elements. B2B brands have been working on Ethos; brand credibility, for a while, ensuring their service offering is the best it can be and becoming thought leaders in their industry. But what about the relationship between Pathos and Logis?

Emotion in B2B

Emotion and logic are both persuasive techniques but people often fail to attribute emotion a place in B2B. French argues: “People buy on emotion and justify on logic.”

While Don Smith, executive creative director at Realise, says: “It’s a basic principle of marketing that it’s the emotional process that leads to conversion.”

But if you, or the members of your C-suite or board, can’t stop thinking about B2B marketing in logical terms then don’t worry. According to Simon Wright, MD at Greenwich Design there is a rational way to create an emotional response.

“The whole process of creating an emotional attachment is logical and rational. An emotional attachment is formed by intentionally creating an attraction to the brand by using the right balance of colours and colour palette,” says Wright.

“It is a well-established fact that colour can be a key device in driving emotive connections with an audience. Emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions and behaviour so it is important to tap into these to build that all important brand attachment,” says Mark Ringer, executive creative director UK & Europe at brand design agency, Anthem.

And brand attachment is what all B2B companies should be striving for, once a customer is attached to a brand they become loyal. There’s also a greater chance they will become customer advocates. Daniel Bausor, managing director at Famous4 Communications says: “Customer advocates need to have that emotional connection because they will be speaking to other customers for you.”

Reaffirming the importance of colour psychology in reference to brand perception, Ringer references a Kissmetrics study that says ‘80 per cent of brand recognition is due to colour.’

Colour perception

Colours can represent different things, and while a breakdown of what they mean can be seen on below, Nick Carr, senior account manager at Pure360 references another study from Kissmetrics, and says: “Women prefer softer colours while men prefer bolder colours. Men also tend to be far more tolerant of anachromatic colours; so blacks, whites and greys.”

While this can’t be taken as absolute for all women and men, it does highlight the importance of understanding your audience, something Chris Mills, UK managing director at Strativity Group recognises.

“People have preconceptions of what colours mean, you have to check with your audience what those preconceptions are,” says Mills. If you change your brand colours your audience may not understand the decision and it could change what they think about you for the worse.

Something people do have in common, however, is an emotional connection to pictures of other people. In a whitepaper on The Psychology Behind Creating Successful Email Marketing, Carr says: “Researchers now believe there is a part of the brain called the ‘fusiform face area’ and its job is just to process images of faces. Interestingly, it’s located right next to the part of the brain that processes emotion. Therefore, our brains are wired to generate an emotional response when we see images of peoples’ faces.”

It’s possible to combine colour psychology with the knowledge that people have an emotional connection with images of faces. Wright gives an example of some recent work for a client: “We ran a photo shoot for a brand website that we are developing. Using images of people in itself in communications triggers an emotional attachment, but we will then make very subtle changes to the images, tweaking eye colour or backgrounds for instance to complement the brand palette.”

The theory

While much can be said about colour psychology, choosing the right colour palette is not the only persuasive technique available to marketers. French also speaks emphatically about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and his six principles of persuasion. 

They are:

1. Scarcity: you want it more if there’s less of it. If you’ve only got 10 places left at an event, use that information in your comms.

2. Likeability: simply, if people like you they are more inclined to buy from you.

3. Reciprocity: if you do something nice for someone, e.g. give something away for free, they are going to want to return the favour by doing something for you.

4. Social proof: people like to act in groups, they will act in the same way the group is acting as this is deemed to be the ‘correct behaviour’ for that circumstance. If you have a large following on a social media network, publicise it.

5. Authority: authority figures are trusted so aim to get that status.

6. Commitment/consistency: once committed to something, people don’t like to break their promises.

Marketing and psychology are clearly intrinsically linked. But some people may struggle with the ethics behind influencing someone’s subconscious. Despite it seeming like a duplicitous activity, many industry spokespeople think it’s unavoidable.

Philip Graves, consumer behaviour consultant and managing director of Shift Consultancy, says: “A large proportion of human behaviour is driven by mental processes that exist outside of conscious awareness. Appealing to someone’s subconscious isn’t a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of communicating in a way that is mindful of the way that they make decisions.”

While Vann Morris, director of buyer behaviour studies and buyer persona development at MLT Creative says: “Chances are we’re appealing to somone’s subconscious whether we try or not.” Carr echoes this and advises marketers to give it some thought and make it effective.

If you made it over the ethical hurdle of, should I/shouldn’t I? Then be careful not to get your foot caught on the next two: research and formula.

Research and formula

It’s all very well knowing the theories but in order to execute them effectively you need to really know your audience and segment them appropriately. Simon Lawrence, CEO and founder of Uncommon Knowledge, segmented his audience of SME business owners in order to use the results as a valuable targeting and communications tool. He found three personality types:

• A group of passionate and emotional evangelists for their business.

• A second group of more analytical owners/directors.

• A third group of entrepreneurial individuals who like ‘doing deals’.

Lawrence says: “Using this data allows us to segment customer databases – to understand the split of these typographies within each base – and to use the knowledge to refine creative treatment. For instance, the first group are mainly interested in brand and service, the second, features and benefits and the third, a good deal.”

In-depth research can be time and resource intensive but without knowing more about your customers’ behaviours and thoughts you’ll struggle to implement the right psychological principles. Bausor reminds B2B marketers of their incentive: “A lot of people won’t do enough research into/with the customer. The sales figures are usually higher in B2B therefore warrant the time commitment and cost to research customers thoroughly.”

However, Smith from Realise isn’t an advocate of using meticulous research every time. He says: “As for the science, you could argue that through rigorous research you could define the optimum colours, typeface, imagery, tonality, etc to have the maximum appeal to the broadest audience. But we all know doing that would lead to a completely average and forgettable brand.”

It would therefore be pretty easy to turn marketing into a box-ticking exercise void of personality by using scientific theories that are ironically designed to appeal to different personality traits. The key? Find the middle ground; do your customer research, don’t discount something because it doesn’t fit neatly in a box but do brush up on your psychology. Chances are you’re already doing the basics.

As Graves concludes: “If any business seriously believes it should rely solely on conscious and rational thought then they should limit their marketing output to text-only emails and text-only adverts: since none of them do this I would argue that they all already realise, at least at an implicit level, that they need to connect with people at a different level.” 

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